Åsne Seierstad’s En av oss: Perpetrator and Victim in the Construction of National Innocence Ellen Rees, University of Oslo Although originally written in Norwegian and only later translated to English, Åsne Seierstad’s 2013 book, En av oss. En fortelling om Norge (translated by Sarah Death and published in 2015 as One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway), appears, as critic Jon Rognlien asserts, largely to have been written with an international audience in mind (Rognlien 2013). Seierstad is a journalist and foreign correspondent who in recent years has achieved international recognition for her non-fiction book, Bokhandleren i Kabul (2002, published in English in 2003 as The Bookseller of Kabul), which examined conditions in Afghanistan at the outset of the recent war from the perspective of one Afghan family. En av oss is also a book-length non-fiction investigation of a national trauma, though in this case the national trauma, the terrorist attacks of 22 July 2011, took place in Seierstad’s own homeland rather than abroad. Seierstad has since gone on to publish To søstre (2016, Two Sisters), which explores the lives of two young Norwegian-Somalian women who choose to join the Islamic State in Syria. In terms of the factual details presented about the sole perpetrator of the attacks in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, En av oss offers little that Norwegian readers had not already learned through previous publications, such as Kjetil Stormark’s Da terroren rammet Norge. 189 minutter som rystet verden (untranslated: When Terror Came to Norway: 189 Minutes that Shook the World), which appeared only months after the massacre in the fall of 2011; Aage Storm Borchgrevink’s En norsk tragedie. Anders Behring Breivik og veiene til Utøya (2012, translated by Guy Puzey as A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and 1 the Massacre on Utøya, 2013); or the official report of the commission that evaluated the response of government agencies to the attacks, Rapport fra 22. juli-kommisjonen (2012, untranslated: Report from the 22 July Commission). Yet despite the relatively modest amount of new material offered by Seierstad, the book has sold equally well domestically and abroad, and thus clearly also serves a domestic purpose. In the following, I explore this domestic purpose, positing that En av oss functions as a narrative about national innocence in which both perpetrator and victims play key roles. The domestic discourse surrounding the terrorist attacks of 22 July1 has been dominated by convictions about Norwegian exceptionalism and underpinned by the widely- held belief that Norway is somehow more ethical and less to blame for global social injustices than the rest of Western society. Terje Tvedt calls this rationalization of Norwegian interests and interventions a “godhetsregime” [regime of goodness], which he describes as “[...] et dominant normlegitimerende og normproduserende regime hvor forestillinger og retorikk om godhet regulerer systeminterne relasjoner og gir systemet dets grunnleggende eksterne legitimitet” (Tvedt 2003, 34) [a dominant regime that legitimizes and produces norms for which representations and rhetoric about goodness regulate the internal relations 1 Like the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001, the terrorist attacks in Norway on 22 July 2011 are commonly referred to by their date alone. Some writers use the notation 22/7, following European conventions for writing the date. Others simply write the date out as “22. juli” [22nd July]. For the sake of simplicity, I follow the practice of the translator of En av oss and use “22 July” throughout. 2 of the system and give the system its fundamental external legitimacy].2 This form of Norwegian exceptionalism is predicated on social democratic ideology, and it was precisely these ideals that the perpetrator set out to attack when he bombed the buildings that housed the coalition government led by the Labor Party and shot to death participants at the annual Labor Party youth camp. It has become a truism that Norway lost its innocence on that summer day. I am interested in examining the conceptual limits of that innocence and how it is constructed through narrative, with Seierstad’s En av oss as a particularly apt example. There are three components to my analysis of how Seierstad frames questions of guilt and innocence in En av oss. The first concerns the degree to which Anders Behring Breivik was or was not portrayed in public discourse as a “monster,” a loaded term often applied to perpetrators of particularly heinous crimes. The second concerns the question of whether Breivik can be considered to be an ideologue who acted out of political conviction. Finally, I explore the degree to which Seierstad portrays the state as in some ways indirectly culpable in the massacre. But before addressing these three areas, I will first examine how Seierstad constructs a collective “us” and structures the book in a way that shifts attention away from the perpetrator and onto his victims. Defining “One of Us” The title of the book, En av oss, appears at first glance to express what Norwegian citizens found most difficult to comprehend about these attacks, namely that they were literally 2 This and all translations from texts in Norwegian other than Seierstad’s En av oss itself are my own. 3 carried out by one of them, and not by external enemies; Breivik was born and raised in Norway as the son of two ethnically Norwegian parents and embraced an overtly “Nordic” identity that encompassed an affiliation with Christianity and whiteness.3 Yet Seierstad in fact resists such a reading of her own title, framing the perpetrator as an extreme outsider, rather than investigating the domestic context that made it possible for him to plan and carry out his attacks. In a review entitled “Hvem er en av oss?” [Who is one of us?] Rognlien raises some of the questions about the issues of inclusion and belonging that I will further interrogate here. Rognlien muses “Jeg lurer både på hvem den ene er, og hva dette oss er” [I wonder both who the one person is, and what this us is], concluding that the “one” cannot be the perpetrator: “Skulle Seierstad ønsket å gjøre ham til ‘en av oss’, måtte hun ikke insistert på hvor elendig han er, på alle måter, i alle vinkler” (Rognlien 2013) [If Seierstad had wished to make him into “one of us,” she would not have insisted on how terrible he was in every way, from every angle]. It is important to note, however, that Seierstad does not so much make the perpetrator out to be “terrible”; instead of portraying him as a dangerous monster, she ridicules him, a point to which I will return below. Seierstad’s book raises, but ultimately fails to answer, larger questions of how we make narrative sense of ideologically driven domestic terrorists, especially when, like Breivik, they come from a position of privilege. Instead she repeatedly redirects the readers’ attention to three of the youths he killed on the island of Utøya, Simon Sæbø, Anders 3 Benjamin R. Teitelbaum points out that Breivik wrote overtly in his manifesto about preserving “the Nordic genotype” and “fought to preserve an imagined racial community” (Teitelbaum 2016, 140–141). 4 Kristiansen and Bano Abobakar Rashid, an eighteen-year-old female Kurdish refugee from Iraq. Seierstad devotes considerable time to demonstrating how these three teenagers were, each in their own way, one of “us.” In her epilogue to the book, she explains what she means by the title: En av oss er en bok om tilhørighet. Og det er en bok om fellesskap. [Simon og Anders] hadde tydelige hjemsteder, både geografisk, politisk og i sine familier. Bano hørte til både i Kurdistan og i Norge. Hennes høyeste ønske var å bli “en av oss”. Nynorsken, bunaden, Nesoddens lokalhistorie. Det fantes ingen snarveier. En av oss er også en bok om det å søke tilhørighet uten å finne det. Gjerningsmannen valgte til slutt å tre ut av fellesskapet; og å ramme det på det mest brutale vis. Underveis i arbeidet med boken innså jeg at den også er en fortelling om Norge. En samtidsfortelling om oss. (Seierstad 2013, 529; italics original) [One of Us is a book about belonging, a book about community. [Simon and Anders] belonged in definite places, geographically, politically and with their families. Bano belonged in both Kurdistan and Norway. Her greatest aspiration was to become “one of us.” [the New Norwegian, the national costume, the local history of Nesodden.]4 There were no short cuts. This is also a book about looking for a way to belong and not finding it. The perpetrator ultimately decided to opt out of the community and strike at it in the most brutal of ways. 4 The translator does not include this passage in the English translation. 5 As I worked on the book, it came to me that this was also a story about contemporary Norway. It is a story about us. (Seierstad 2015, 523)] Seierstad makes it clear, then, that her primary concern is with the victims rather than with the perpetrator. This is reflected in the original subtitle of the book, which translates as A Story About Norway. The more sensational subtitle of Sarah Death’s translation, The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, is thus misleading. It is not, in fact, the story of the perpetrator, and Seierstad indicates this in a number of ways throughout the text. One clear example of this is that she begins the book from the perspective of an unidentified person whom the reader later learns is Bano; the book’s preface opens with “Hun løp” (Seierstad 2013, 7) [“She ran” (Seierstad 2015, ix)].